"It triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances." - New York Times Book Review

Best General Interest Books, selected by Public Library ReviewersFinalist, Ferro-Grumley Award for FictionFinalist, Lambda Literary Award

"It triumphs as an intimate and humane evocation of day-to-day life under inhumane circumstances." - New York Times Book Review

"A stirring and deeply felt story." - Kirkus Reviews

"Empowering and bold...Bledsoe injects life and dimension through her often stunning dialogue. With heart and zest, the author depicts Lucybelle’s slice of life as both pleasant and harrowing." - Publishers Weekly

"Bledsoe’s novel is an absolute wonder. Combining a McCullers-like facility in letting her settings tell half the story with characterization and dialogue worthy of Harper Lee, Bledsoe dives deep into the life of her protagonist...A Thin Bright Line will help widen the metaphorical crack in the chains that bind those who are outside of societal norms." - New York Journal of Books

"Berkeley author Lucy Jane Bledsoe shows the sexy side of the 1950s in her new novel, A Thin Bright Line." - San Francisco Chronicle

"Author Lucy Jane Bledsoe is an impressively gifted novelist who in the pages of her latest epic, "A Thin Bright Line" is able to consistently engage her readers rapt and total attention from cover to cover." - Midwest Book Review

"An engaging and moving novel about an unforgettable character. Bledsoe’s writing is intelligent, unadorned, and unsentimental, which allows us to look at a difficult time in American history with clarity instead of nostalgia." - Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman

"Lucy Jane Bledsoe's A Thin Bright Line is a testament to courage and perseverance in the face of oppression. It's also a compelling, literary page-turner worthy of standing alongside the works of Pat Barker and Graham Greene. It reminds us that we are nothing, deep down, without love and dignity." - Patrick Ryan, The Dream Life of Astronauts

"Like the scientists whose papers she edits, Lucybelle Bledsoe is passionate about the truth. Whether it’s the climate history of the planet as illuminated by cores of polar ice, or the pursuit of an authentic emotional life in the miasma of McCarthyism, she operates with piercing honesty. This is gripping historical fiction about queer life at the height of the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement, but what really makes it sing are the places where it’s grounded in fact. Through meticulous research, Lucy Bledsoe has reconstructed the life of her long lost Aunt Lucybelle, a woman no one seems to have known much about—but with whom she discovers she shares much more than a name." - Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

"In this ingenious hybrid of fact and fiction, a fine novelist uses her storytelling skills to recover the lost life of a favorite aunt, a bookish, unmarried scientist from Arkansas. With her story Bledsoe also exhumes a dark, clandestine age in American history, the time of Ann Bannon and Patricia Highsmith, but made more intimate and real." - Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws

"Through her fictional reconstruction of the life of her namesake, her beloved aunt—who fought the good fight as a pioneering professional and a lesbian in unsympathetic times—Lucy Jane Bledsoe recreates an important piece of history and imagines what it was like to live it. A Thin Bright Line is poignant in both its conception and execution." - Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution